Adventures in Baseball Archeology: the Negro Leagues, Latin American baseball, J-ball, the minors, the 19th century, and other hidden, overlooked, or unknown corners of baseball history...with occasional forays into other sports.

cuban stars (west)

January 11, 2017

The above broadside advertising a June 11 game between the Cuban Stars and Marshall University dates, according to Getty Images, to 1920. Okay, to be clear they say “ca. 1920.” But it should be immediately obvious to anyone reading the text that it couldn’t be from anywhere near 1920. And it’s fairly easy to establish exactly what year it’s from.

The text, which might be a little small to read, goes like this:

“This team, composed of native Cubans, defeated the World’s Champion Athletics nine out of twelve games. Mendez, considered by many experts as the best pitcher in the world, will probably pitch. Pedrosa, the hitless wonder, is also with them.”

First of all, the reference to Eustaquio “Bombín” Pedroso as the “hitless wonder” refers to his 11-inning no-hit win over the Detroit Tigers in Havana in the fall of 1909, so we know it happened after 1909. The broadside also refers to the Philadelphia Athletics’ fall 1910 visit to Havana after beating the Giants in the World Series. They didn’t actually play the “Cuban Stars” then, but rather the Almendares and Habana teams, and they didn’t lose 9 out of 12 games either (dropping 6 out of 10 instead). So the earliest it could be dated would be June 1911.

Now let’s come at it from the other direction. In 1920 José Méndez was pitching for, and managing, the Kansas City Monarchs, and in June of that year he can firmly be placed with the Monarchs and not either of the Cuban Stars teams.

In fact, at that point Méndez hadn’t played for the Cuban Stars in the United States for eight years. He played for them in 1908, 1909, 1911, and 1912, along with a brief appearance late in the season in 1910, after the Stars of Cuba had folded. Pedroso was his teammate only in 1912, again excepting only brief, late-season appearances side by side in 1910 and 1911.

In other words, Pedroso and Méndez played together on the Cuban Stars in the United States in the month of June only in the year 1912.

And as it happens, the Cuban Stars were in West Virginia and vicinity at that time. I couldn’t find a box score or reference to the June 11 game, but on June 8 Méndez himself took the mound to defeat Daddy Clay’s Giants in Pittsburgh, two home runs by Rafael Figarola featuring the game:

(Pittsburgh Press, June 9, 1912, p. 22)

And on June 14 the Cuban Stars beat the University of West Virginia 12 to 1 in Morgantown. Méndez didn’t appear, but Pedroso did, playing right field, getting a couple of singles, and later coming in to pitch.

(Pittsburgh Daily Post, June 15, 1912, p. 14)

Another way to look at it is that the broadside says the game was to take place on Tuesday, June 11. In 1920 June 11 fell on a Friday. During José Méndez’s whole career in the U.S., which stretched from 1908 to 1926, June 11 fell on a Tuesday exactly twice—in 1918, at which time he was playing for the Los Angeles White Sox, and in…1912.

So I think we can say with some certainty that the broadside was advertising a game that was scheduled to be played on June 11, 1912.

...oh, and here is a picture of me working on this post last night:

UPDATE 1/30/2017: Courtesy of Bill Mullins, here is a report of a June 11, 1912, game played in Huntington, West Virginia, though this report has the Cuban Stars facing the Huntington team rather than Marshall University:

September 5, 2014

On the morning of Friday, May 23, 1919, Tinti Molina brought his Cuban Stars across the Mexican/U.S. border at Laredo, Texas. His team announced their presence in the United States that afternoon with a 22 to 2 walloping of the local club at Caliche Park. The Cuban pitcher, one “LeBlanc,” twirled “a fine game.” Meanwhile in St. Louis fans were looking forward to the Cubans’ arrival for a three-game series in the brand-new Giants Park starting on Sunday, May 25. The Cubans, as you can see in their border-crossing records, gave St. Louis as their destination in the U.S. But Giants rooters were disappointed to hear that Molina’s team “had been held up by emigration authorities and could not reach St. Louis in time for the big series” (St. Louis Argus, May 30, 1919). Evidently, the “emigration authorities” were forcing the Cubans to play a further three games in Laredo on Saturday and Sunday.

(Laredo Times, May 25, 1919, p. 11)

Charlie Mills, the Giants’ business manager, either bought the excuse, or didn’t care. He released the Cubans from their obligations, and the Cuban Stars passed through St. Louis on Tuesday, May 27, on their way to Chicago, where they were scheduled to meet the American Giants on Friday.

With them would go the guy we’re really interested in here, the pitcher Leblanc. He had been a journeyman catcher in Cuba before pitching a half-dozen games for Molina’s team in the Cuban league during the 1918/19 season. The 1919 North American season would be something of a breakthrough for him, as he would establish himself as the Cuban Stars’ ace.

There are two interesting points about Leblanc. First, his greatest successes as a ballplayer were really in the United States. His Cuban League record over three seasons as pitcher amounted to a meager 4-7. But in the U.S., he would go 32-24 against top black competition for a team that went 89-93 overall. For two of those years, 1919 and 1920, the Cubans were exclusively a road club; Leblanc’s 17-12 in those seasons was his road record. By 1921, Leblanc was one of the top pitchers in the Negro National League.

The other thing about Leblanc is that we know very little about him. We know his primary pitch was a spitball, and we know that he probably threw right-handed. Other than that….virtually nothing. I haven’t been able to find a team photo of the western Cuban Stars in 1919-1921, and I am reasonably certain I’ve never seen a photo of Leblanc. We don’t even really know what his name was. He appears as “Julio LeBlanc” in reference books, but I’ve so far seen him called only “José Leblanc” (with a small “b”) in Cuban sources (which is the usage I’ve adopted in the Seamheads DB).* Passenger lists or border-crossing records are not a help in his case. I’ve located the Cuban Stars teams traveling to the U.S. in each of Leblanc’s three seasons—but nobody named anything like Leblanc accompanied them, nor can I find any reasonable candidates traveling at different times or on different ships.

Twelve players are known to have appeared for the Cuban Stars in 1919. There are border-crossing records for ten of them (along with manager Molina)—everyone except Leblanc, and the young catcher Eufemio Abreu.

But Latin names, which include both the father’s and mother’s surname, can be complicated. For example, “Jose I. Casanova” (at the top right) is actually the pitcher known as JoséJunco—Junco was his father’s name, Casanova his mother’s. Similarly, “Francisco Toledo” here is the player known as“Tatica” Campos. It’s quite possible for a Cuban player to be known by one name, but appear in some official records with both a different surname and a different given name.

And it turns out that there were two more men who traveled with the Cuban Stars to the United States in 1919, 1920, and 1921, all three of the seasons Leblanc was with the team. Their names were Manuel Barros and Isidro Valdés, and neither is a name known from a baseball context.

Since both Barros and Valdés (how the name is spelled in the 1920 and 1921 passenger lists) crossed the border with the Cuban Stars at Laredo on May 23, and since we know Leblanc pitched for the Cuban Stars later that same day, it seems virtually certain that “Leblanc” is really one of these men. And the other could well be Abreu (who also played for the Cubans for those three seasons, before first appearing on a 1923 passenger list under the name Eufemio Abreu). But which is which…there’s no way to tell yet.

Playing in an independent league in Santiago de Cuba in February, 1922, Leblanc was hit on the head with a bat by the infielder Antonio Susini during a game. His skull was fractured. He lingered in a coma for a few days before dying, leaving only slippery traces in fading box scores.

*-The only mildly famous “Julio LeBlanc” I’ve found in Cuban history was a notorious member of the secret police during the Gerardo Machado regime. This LeBlanc also came to a violent end, beaten and kicked to death by a mob during the uprising that ended Machado’s rule in 1933.

(NOTE: This piece was originally published in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin on September 22, 2010.)

UPDATE 9/6/2014 Since this article is nearly four years old, I should add a couple more notes about his name that I’ve come up with since then. In 1927 the catcher José María Fernández remarked in an interview published in Diario de la Marina that his “greatest disgust” in baseball was “the day that the player Susini killed the pitcher ‘Cheo’ Leblanc, in Santiago de Cuba, with a blow to the head.” “Cheo” is a nickname for José. But I’ve also run across a few references to Leblanc as “Jules” (not Julio) while he was still alive, most notably in Diario de la Marina on December 12, 1921, where he’s called “Monseñor Jules Leblanc” and said to have “manos ducales” (a duke’s hands) and a “pose aristocrática” (an aristocratic pose). He was also sometimes called “Count” Leblanc.

UPDATE 9/7/2014See here for an account of Leblanc’s murder and to find out what happened to his killer.

March 12, 2014

Brian Campf sent me this seemingly ordinary photograph from the early part of the century:

But zoom in on one of the posters in the shop window behind the family, to the left (their right):

It’s barely legible, but at the top the poster reads:

CUBANSPHILA. GIANTS

Then, after a photograph of a ball player surrounded by unfortunately unreadable text, it says:

MACK PARK(illegible) MAY (??)

There’s only a very narrow window of time in which this photograph could have been taken. The Philadelphia Giants disbanded in August, 1911; though there were later teams that used that name, they tended to remain on the east coast, rarely if ever venturing into the Midwest. Detroit’s Mack Park, semi-pro venue and later home of the Detroit Stars, was opened in May, 1910.

As it turns out, the Cuban Stars and the Philadelphia Giants met in Detroit for a five-game series, lasting from May 31 to June 4, 1911, for what the promoter John Roesink would call the “world’s semi-pro championship.” (Roesink would later own the Detroit Stars.) So the photo must have been taken in May, 1911, presumably in Detroit.

(Detroit Free Press, May 23, 1911, p. 10)

The “S. & S.” team was Mack Park's original home team, the Schmitz and Shroder semipro club, which Roesink managed. The Philadelphia Giants were returning to the east from a stay in Chicago; this was to be their last western trip. Managed by Grant “Home Run” Johnson, their lineup featured rookies Dick Redding and Louis Santop (called “Loftin,” his real last name, in the box scores), but the once-proud team was on its last legs.

Both teams had played in Detroit before. Back in 1909 the Giants had beaten Rube Foster’s Leland Giants two games out of three in Bennett Park, home of the Detroit Tigers. The Cuban Stars, who had appeared in Mack Park in July, 1910, were a big draw in Detroit, in large part due to the Tigers’ trips to Cuba in 1909 and 1910. Even though the Giants had some well-known players, my bet would be that the player pictured on the poster was probably one of the Cubans, most likely José Méndez, who had already received a fair amount of publicity in the United States by this time.

Méndez would win the first game, coming in to relieve J. F. Marlota in the fifth inning despite having pitched a complete game victory over the S. & S. the day before:

(Detroit Free Press, June 1, 1911, p. 10)

The Cubans would take the series handily, four games out of five, with Méndez picking up two of the victories and striking out 15 in 14 innings.

I don’t know of any other photo that (completely by accident, it seems) shows an advertisement for a Negro league game in the background. It appears to be unique in that respect.

August 13, 2012

For whatever reason the scrap of typescript attached to the photo says (inaccurately) that the team existed in 1912. Actually it was 1910. Here are the correct names of the players and officials in the photo (so far as I know):

I’m not sure why Marcelino Guerra is called “Sueya” (a nickname, maybe?). As you can see, this photograph includes every player who appeared for the Stars of Cuba against other top black teams that year, with the sole exception of Juliân “Fallanca” Pérez. Incidentally, this is the only photo I’ve seen of José Muñoz actually in a baseball uniform; he’s in other team pictures, but always wearing a suit and tie.

Missing from this photo are Eustaquio Pedroso and Allyn McAllister, and present are William Niesen, Armando Cabañas, and Guerra, which may give us a clue as to when it was taken.

Allyn McAllister was the founder of the Stars of Cuba. A bicycle shop proprietor from Chicago, McAllister entered the ranks of baseball promoters in the fall of 1909 when he organized a major league all-star team to play the Cuban League teams in Havana. It was a genuine all-star team, too, featuring Three Finger Brown, Addie Joss, Sherry Magee, and Fred Merkle, although they only managed two wins in five games against Habana and Almendares.

While in Cuba, McAllister decided to move in on Abel Linares’s turf, signing up Cuban players to tour the U.S. the following summer. He plucked Linares’s prize asset, José Méndez, the biggest star in Cuban baseball, and some other good players, including José Muñoz and Eustaquio Pedroso, giving him Cuba’s top three pitchers.

Here is a detail from a passenger list for the S.S. Mascotte, arriving in Tampa on May 4, 1910, showing eight of the Stars of Cuba players travelling together:

It was after the team got to Chicago that the trouble started. At some point Pedroso had defected to Linares’s Cuban Stars. McAllister then sued Pedroso, contending that he had signed an exclusive contract with the Stars of Cuba. In early June, a judge threw out McAllister’s suit on the grounds that the contract lacked “mutuality”—that is, Pedroso was required to play ball only for McAllister during 1910, but McAllister was not required to retain or pay Pedroso at all. The story was picked up by the AP and popped up in newspapers all over the country, often with headlines that implied the decision invalidated all baseball contracts. Francis Richter of Sporting Life felt it necessary to intervene, quoting the AP story and adding their own commentary about how the case had little bearing on organized baseball:

(Sporting Life, June 11, 1910, p. 4)

With Pedroso lost, the Stars of Cuba were weakened a little; and the problems didn’t stop there. The team started cancelling dates in early July, causing some frustration among the local clubs. One W. C. Niesen, manager of the Gunthers club, took a vocal role against McAllister.

(Chicago Tribune, July 9, 1910, p. 10)

Starting on July 10 the Stars of Cuba rebelled against McAllister; they were now operating “under new management,” as the Chicago Examiner (July 20) would later explain—which apparently meant W. C. Niesen and his allies. Their new handlers lined up a three-game series in mid-July between the Stars of Cuba and Linares’s Cuban Stars, with two of the games played at Artesian Park. The Stars of Cuba, fortified by the addition of Armando Cabañas and Marcelino Guerra from Cuba, won the first two games; the last, on July 14 at Artesian Park, saw a matchup of aces, with Pedroso of the Cuban Stars besting Méndez 3 to 2.

With Cabañas and Guerra on the roster and McAllister gone, we now have the cast of characters that appears in the team photo above; Niesen’s boycott of the team seems to have been aimed at wresting control of it from McAllister, and there he his in the team photo, along with “Jones,” presumably some partner of Niesen.

On July 19 the Chicago City League banned its clubs from playing “colored teams” (other than the Chicago Giants, who were league members, of course), a decision widely understood to be aimed at the two Cuban clubs. This was another item about local Chicago baseball that was picked up by the AP and printed in newspapers all over the country.

(Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 19, 1910, p. 8)

This makes the fault lines in Chicago’s independent pro baseball scene that summer pretty clear, despite the forest of similar-sounding names (Cuban Stars, Stars of Cuba, Leland Giants, Leland’s Chicago Giants). Keep in mind that Niesen’s Gunthers were not members of the Chicago City League, and neither were Rube Foster’s Chicago Leland Giants. The previous winter, Foster had wrested control of the Leland Giants (and most of the team’s players) from eponymous founder Frank Leland. Leland, enjoined from using the name “Leland Giants,” then organized his own team, referred to (confusingly) as Leland’s Chicago Giants. Leland did convince the Chicago League to let him keep his team’s league franchise, thus the “new” Chicago Giants replaced the defending champion Leland Giants in the City League.

So on the one hand you had the Chicago City League, which included the city’s white semipro establishment, plus Frank Leland and his new Chicago Giants. On the other hand you had Rube Foster’s Leland Giants and William C. Niesen, now controlling the Stars of Cuba as well as the Gunthers. One assumes that Allyn McAllister was originally aligned with the Chicago League, so his ouster from the Stars of Cuba may have been a large part of the reason for the League’s ban on games with the Cubans. Abel Linares’s Cuban Stars of Havana, incidentally, played the Chicago Giants several times, but never once took the field against Foster’s Leland Giants, so they may have been more closely aligned with the City League crowd, despite their July games against Niesen’s Stars of Cuba.

On August 7 the Chicago Tribune reported that Allyn McAllister had obtained an injunction against the Stars of Cuba playing baseball under any management except his.

(Chicago Tribune, August 7, 1910, p. C2)

That day he showed up at Normal Park before a scheduled game between the Stars and Foster’s Leland Giants, flanked by three policemen and an interpreter. It did not exactly go according to plan:

(Chicago Examiner, August 8, 1910, p. 8)

The Stars went ahead and played the game, losing to Frank Wickware and the Lelands 8 to 6. A couple of days later they were hauled into court to explain themselves, but apparently the players (and, perhaps, Niesen) were able to reach some kind of settlement with McAllister:

(Chicago Tribune, August 11, 1910, p. 11)

(Chicago Examiner, August 12, 1910, p. 7)

A week or two after that the Stars of Cuba left for a series in Kansas City, Kansas, before returning to Chicago for some games against the Leland Giants. Apparently the Stars of Cuba broke up soon after; by September 14 the team’s star and player-manager, José Méndez, had left to join the Linares Cuban Stars on the east coast. As far as Allyn McAllister goes, this seems to have been the final chapter of his brief (and rather inglorious) career in baseball management.

December 19, 2011

Here’s a cool photo of José Méndez I hadn’t seen before, from the August 20, 1912, Cleveland Plain Dealer. Just another example of how famous Méndez was in the U.S. around that time, surely the best-known ballplayer from outside organized baseball. Not sure what that round thing growing out of his back is supposed to be.

Incidentally, as the article tells us, the Tellings semipro team was trying to get University of Michigan star George Sisler to pitch against Méndez in the next game. But the marquee matchup did not come off. Sisler didn’t show up, and Méndez was “attacked with acute indigestion” just before game time and couldn’t play. So instead it was Luis “Chicho” González who took the mound and disposed of the Tellings 3 to 1.

July 21, 2011

More than a year and a half ago I reported on a couple of items from Cuban newspapers in 1909 claiming that Luis Padrón’s contract had actually been purchased by the Chicago White Sox when he tried out for them on July 22. According to the pseudonymous correspondent “Bancroft,” who was supposedly reporting from Chicago, Comiskey paid Abel Linares and Tinti Molina $1000 for the rights to Padrón. The player wasn’t supposed to report to the White Sox until mid-September. If true, this would mean not only that Padrón was twice the property of a major league club without being called up (the other team being the 1913 Boston Braves), but that he was the first Cuban League product to have been signed by the major leagues, predating Rafael Almeida and Armando Marsans by nearly two years (even if he never actually played).

At the time I actually thought this story sounded unlikely, in large part because I strongly doubted that a major league club would bother to pay a club outside organized baseball—especially one that employed black players and played on the blackball circuit—for a player. There was, I supposed, the chance that Comiskey might have wanted to cultivate a relationship with Linares and Molina in the hopes of establishing a permanent pipeline of Cuban talent to the White Sox. That would have been a pretty noteworthy development, considering that no Cuban League players had made it to the majors yet, so I was dubious.

That was before I had heard of Rule 50, a clause added to the National Agreement in July 1909, right before Padrón’s tryout with the White Sox. Here’s the account in Sporting Life (July 10, 1909):

It may be worth noting that sources in the U.S. reported (mistakenly, I had previously assumed) that Comiskey had actually signed Padrón, as in this note from Sporting Life (July 31, 1909):

So protection was extended to semiprofessional clubs, especially those in the Chicago area, in early July, 1909—and within a few weeks Luis Padrón of the Cuban Stars (who spent a large portion of their summer in Chicago) was reported to have been signed by the White Sox for a fee. Coincidence?

There was also talk in early 1910 that the semipro Chicago City League would become formally a part of Organized Baseball. Considering that the League had featured one black team for several years (the Leland Giants in 1908 and 1909, the Chicago Giants in 1910) this would have been quite a landmark. The notion came to nothing, of course. One assumes in any case that if the Chicago League had joined OB, the black teams would have been kicked out—as in fact they were after 1910 anyway.

Rule 50—which became Rule 52 in 1910—and its protection of semiprofessional contracts lasted for less than a year. Francis Richter explains in Sporting Life (June 18, 1910)

NOTE: The image of the Luis Padrón baseball card, from the 1909 Cabañas set, can be found at Cubanball.com.

December 31, 2009

Anybody who knows better can tell me differently, but as far
as I know there is only a single microfilm edition of the Chicago
Defender.The original copy came
(I believe) from the University of Chicago.Unfortunately, while this is a decent run of the paper, it
is far from complete or pristine.Some entire issues are missing, or are represented by only a couple of
pages (such as July 14 and July 21, 1917).Since the Defender was in those days a weekly paper,
such gaps in the record can have a huge impact.

Then there are problems like this:a full, play-by-play account of an American Giants-Cuban
Stars game (played on June 10, 1917, one of the few games Dick Redding lost all
season) that was mangled in the University of Chicago’s original copy of the
paper.We’re left with only the
first four and a half innings.You
can just make out that Frank Warfield threw out Bill Francis to start the
bottom of the fifth; but what happened to Leroy Grant or Bruce Petway, who
batted after him?

Now, if another library—just one other library—has a run of
the actual, printed-on-paper Chicago Defender, we would stand a very good
chance of being able to fill in the gaps left by the standard microfilm edition—just
as I did with a couple of Cuban Stars games in 1921. But didanybody
else save the paper?It’s true
that probably not that many libraries would have subscribed to and saved
African-American newspapers in the first half of the twentieth century; but
really, no place else, not even in New York City or Philadelphia, or even
somewhere else in Chicago?And
what about the Chicago Defender itself?What little I know about it suggests that black weeklies, due to cost
and space constraints, simply haven’t been able to keep complete archives,
especially from decades ago.

If anybody knows of a library or collection or archive that houses an
honest-to-goodness dead-tree run of the Defender (not just a few
scattered issues, but a stretch of years) from the first three or four decades
of the twentieth century, let me know.

June 6, 2009

These, of course, are the Linares/Molina (western) Cuban Stars; that’s Tinti Molina in the suit and hat, between Pastor Pareda and Agustín Parpetti.

The photographer, J. C. Patton, was actually pretty well-known. In 1915 he was the only African-American present at the National Photographers Association of America convention (held in Indianapolis), and samples of his work can be found on, for example, the Ohio Historical Society website. He took this photograph of the 317th Engineers baseball team on July 31, 1918, at Camp Sherman, Chillicothe, Ohio:

While I’ve seen a few references to this team, I don’t think I have any box scores or names of players, so at this point I can’t identify any of these men.